Staring at the Sun

by Julian Barnes

  The next day they went for a walk in the morning, because it wasn’t right to waste petrol even on their honeymoon, came back to the pub for lunch, walked again in the afternoon, washed and changed; and as they were going down for dinner, Jean asked, “Can we be friends tonight?”

  “I’ll have to rape you if this goes on,” he replied with a smile.

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “Well, you’ll have to let me kiss you tonight. No rolling over.”

  “All right.”

  “And with the lights on.”

  The third evening, Jean said, “Perhaps tomorrow.”

  “Perhaps? For Christ’s sake, we’re halfway through our bloody honeymoon. We might as well have gone hiking or something.” His face seemed very red as he stared at her. She felt frightened: not just because he was angry, but because she realized he could get angrier. She also thought: hiking, that sounds nice.

  “All right, tomorrow.”

  But the next night she developed a stomach cramp shortly after dinner, and the matter had to be postponed. She could sense Michael getting crosser. She had heard, somewhere, that men needed physical release more than women. What happened if they were denied it? Did they blow up, like a car radiator? On the fifth evening, they talked less over dinner. Michael ordered a brandy. Suddenly, Jean whispered, “Come up in twenty minutes.”

  She collected the box and went to the bathroom along the passage. She lay on the floor with her heels on the edge of the bath and tried to insert her cap. Something was wrong with her muscles. She wondered, briefly, if she should turn out the light and think of Prosser in his black Hurricane with a red glow on his face and hands; perhaps that would relax her. But she knew it was wrong. Instead, she tried squatting; but after some initial success the cap shot out of her and messed the bathmat. She tried again with her legs up; now it was beginning to hurt. She washed the black rubber monster, dried and powdered it, then put it back in its tin.

  She lay in bed and listened to the rumble of voices in the bar below. Michael seemed to be taking a long time. Perhaps he was having another brandy. Perhaps he had run off with someone who wasn’t defective.

  He didn’t bother with the bathroom, just stood in the dark discarding his clothes; she tried to guess from the noises which items were being unbuttoned and pulled off. She heard a drawer squeak and imagined him putting on his pyjamas. There was a whoop of conversation from the bar below. He climbed into bed, kissed her on the cheek, rolled on top of her, pulled up her flannelette nightdress and tugged at the pyjama cord he’d only just tied. Sex-hyphen, she suddenly remembered.

  The lubricating jelly had given her a surrogate wetness, which seemed to flatter him. After some hunting around, he pushed into her with less difficulty than either of them had imagined. Even so, it hurt. She lay there, waiting for him to say something. When, instead, he began to move up and down inside her, she murmured, very politely, “I’m afraid I couldn’t get my thing in, darling.”

  “Oh,” he said, in a curious, neutral voice, a voice from his job. “Oh.” He didn’t sound cross or disappointed, as she had expected him to. Instead, he began pushing harder into her, and just as she was starting to panic at the assault, he gave a high nasal wheeze, pulled out and ejaculated on her stomach. It was all very unexpected. It was like someone being sick over you, she thought.

  When he half rolled away, she said, “I’m soaked. You’ve soaked me.”

  “It always feels as if there’s more than there really is,” he replied. “It’s like blood.”

  They were both silent at that sentence, at its implications as well as its mention of blood. He was panting slightly. She could smell brandy. She lay there with the bar talk rumbling on below as if nothing at all had happened anywhere in the world; she lay there in the dark, thinking about blood. Black and red, black and red—the colours of Prosser’s universe. Perhaps they were the only colours in the world when you came down to it.

  “I’ll get you a handkerchief,” Michael said eventually.

  “Don’t put the light on.”

  “No.”

  Another drawer squeaked, and he passed her a handkerchief. It felt the size of a head scarf. She laid it over her stomach, put her hand on it, and rubbed gently in a circular motion. The gesture children use to indicate hunger. Except that someone had just been sick over her. She screwed the handkerchief into a ball, threw it out of bed, pulled down her nightdress and rolled over on her side.

  The next morning she kept her eyes closed when she heard Michael wake. He came back whistling from the bathroom, dressed, gave her a shake, slapped her chummily on the hip and murmured, “See you down there, darling.”

  Perhaps it was all right. She dressed quickly and hurried down. Yes, it did seem to be all right, or so she judged from the way he kept passing her too much toast and topping up her cup before it was empty. Perhaps he didn’t think she was defective; perhaps he wouldn’t send her back.

  She had to say something about it, though. This was what happened in marriage, after all. That evening, as they changed for dinner. She found courage when his back was turned. “I’m sorry about last night.”

  He didn’t answer. He probably was cross. She started again. “I’m sure … I’m sure next time …”

  He came around to where she was sitting on the bed and sat half beside her, half behind her. He put a big finger to her lips. “Shh,” he went. “It’s quite all right. It’s natural you’re highly strung at this sort of time. I won’t make a nuisance of myself again before we leave.”

  That wasn’t what she wanted to hear at all. It was kind enough, but it seemed almost to be changing the subject. She had to try again. They weren’t like their parents, after all, were they: they had read books, and Michael, presumably, had been to the brothels in London. She took his finger from her lips.

  “I’ll manage next time,” she said, beginning to shake a little; though perhaps this was because Michael was gripping her shoulder rather hard.

  “We aren’t talking about it,” he said firmly. “That’s enough now. You’ll do.” He placed both hands over her face in a soap-smelling caress. One covered the top of her face down to the tip of her nose; the other covered her mouth and chin. A little light peeped in between two of his slightly parted fingers. He held her there for a while, in the soft cage of his hands.

  For the last two nights of their honeymoon he didn’t trouble her. They returned to live in the two rooms Michael’s gaunt mother had allotted them in her square, cold house. The first week was not a success. Either she had a sticky-fingered struggle with her diaphragm, only to find that Michael stayed up late talking to his mother; or she didn’t bother and found him pressing up hard against her. She would go off to the bathroom, struggle and panic, then return and find him asleep, or feigning sleep.

  “Michael,” she said, the second time this happened. He grunted. “Michael, what is it?”

  “Nothing,” he said, in a voice that meant: Something.

  “Tell me.” No reply. “Go on.” No reply. “I can’t be expected to guess.”

  Eventually, in a weary voice, he replied, “It’s meant to be spontaneous.”

  “Oh dear.”

  The following night, with help from a little drink, Michael elaborated. It’s no good if it isn’t spontaneous; and for want of better, or any other, information, she agreed, It’s awful if everything’s cut and dried. There’s something sickening about getting on the boil, pardon the expression, and then having to go off the boil for ten minutes or so; she agreed, blushing inwardly and wondering how long other women took. They couldn’t go on having this charade, never coinciding, like the weathermen on a cuckoo clock; she agreed. It would probably help matters—just to begin with, just until they knew one another better—if they decided on certain days when she would … put her thing in; not, of course, that this necessarily …; she agreed. It seemed to him, thinking it over, that Saturday was one obvious time, because there was always Sunday mornin
g as well if he was too tired on Saturday night; and perhaps Wednesday as well, at least as long as his current shift pattern continued. She agreed, she agreed. Saturday and Wednesday, she said to herself, on Saturday and Wednesday we shall be spontaneous.

  The system worked quite well. She got better at handling the box; Michael didn’t hurt her; she became used to the noises he made—the sort of noises you normally associated with small mammals. There was something distinctly nice about sex, she decided, about having your husband’s sex-hyphen joined to you, about feeling him turn childish in your arms.

  Even so, it did leave her with quite a lot of time for thought. This wasn’t, after all, the time when she most loved Michael; she wished it were, but it wasn’t. As for the feelings she had in what Dr. Headley would have referred to as her nether regions … well, where were all these interlocking crosscurrents she had been led to expect? Where was the honk of gulls and that pure stretch of sand now bearing a single trail of footprints—footprints whose toes pointed outwards? It wasn’t like anything she’d ever experienced before. Or was it? Slowly, a memory clarified itself. Yes, that was it: down at the Old Green Heaven with Uncle Leslie, playing the Shoelace Game. That’s what it was like: ticklish, and nice, and a bit funny, and different.

  She began to laugh as she remembered, but this disturbed Michael, and she turned the laugh into a cough. What a coincidence. But then she’d always known that sex was funny. It was what she had told Dr. Headley. Silly Dr. Headley.

  And that was it, she supposed, lying there one night beneath Michael. That was her life. She didn’t feel self-pity about this, merely recognized it. You were born, you grew up, you got married. People pretended—perhaps they really believed—that when you got married it was the start of your life. But it wasn’t like that. Getting married was an end, not a beginning: why else did so many films and books finish at the altar? Getting married was an answer, not a question. This wasn’t a matter for complaint, simply a matter for observation. You got married, and that was you settled.

  Settled. They used that word a lot. Settling down; getting settled; settle yourself. What else did you settle, Jean wondered. Of course, a bill. You owed money, and you settled the bill. It was like that with growing up. Your parents looked after you, and they expected something from you in return, even if neither of you defined that expectation. There was some bill to be paid. Marriage settled the account.

  It didn’t mean you would be happy ever after. It didn’t mean that. It just meant you were settled. You’ll do: Michael had said that, just as Mother had. You’ll do. Some test had been passed. Even if you were unhappy, you would be looked after. That was what happened, that was what she had seen. There would be children, of course, and this always made the man more responsible. Not that Michael wasn’t responsible: he was a policeman, after all. And she would spruce him up a little. There would be a house. There would be children. The war would end. She was a big girl now. She was still—she still could be—Michael’s little girl; but that was another matter. She was grown-up. The children would confirm that. Their helplessness would prove that she was grown-up, that she was settled.

  The next morning, alone, she looked in the mirror. Brown hair which had lost its childhood yellow. Blue eyes with flecks of indeterminate colour in them, like knitting wool. A squarish jaw which no longer dissatisfied her. She tried smiling at herself, but it didn’t really work. She would do, she supposed; she wasn’t pretty, and she wasn’t complacent, but she would do.

  As she stared into the mirror and the knitting-wool eyes stared back, Jean felt that now she knew all the secrets; all the secrets of life. There was a dark, warm cupboard; she had taken out something heavy, wrapped in brown paper. There was no need to cheat—no need to unscrew a tiny viewing hole and peer in with a torch. She was grown-up. She could carefully and seriously unwrap the paper. She knew what: she would find. Four slim ochre points. Golf tees. Of course. What else would you expect? Only a child would take them for hyacinths. Only a child would expect them to sprout. Grown-ups knew that golf tees never sprouted.

  2

  Three wise men—are you serious?

  —GRAFFITO, c. 1984

  MICHAEL STRUCK FIRE with his heels. That was how, in later years, Jean was to remember him. In the toolshed he kept a shoemaker’s last—a heavy, three-footed iron object, like the coat of arms from some comic country—and on it he would hammer steel corners into the heels of each new pair of shoes he bought. Then he would walk ahead of her, a little too quickly, so that every few strides she would have to break into a clumsy half-run. And as he walked she would hear the sliding scrape of a carving knife on a back step, and fire would be struck from the pavement.

  Jean’s marriage lasted twenty years. After the guilty disappointment of the honeymoon came the longer, slower dismay of living together. Perhaps she had imagined too strongly that it would be just like not living together: that the life of high, airy skies and light, loose clouds would continue—a life of good-night kisses, excited greetings, silly games, and unspoken hopes miraculously fulfilled. Now she found the hopes had to be spoken if they were to come to anything, and the games seemed far too silly if played by only one person; as for the excited greetings, they followed so closely upon the good-night kisses, and so regularly, that they could hardly stay excited all the time. No doubt it was the same for Michael, too.

  But what puzzled her was how closely you could live beside someone without any sense of intimacy—or what she had always imagined intimacy to be. They lived, ate, slept together, they had jokes no one else could decipher, they were familiar with one another down to their underclothes; but what seemed to emerge from all this were mere patterns of behaviour rather than prized familiarities of response. Jean had imagined—hadn’t she?—that the honeysuckle would wrap itself round the hawthorn, that the saplings planted side by side would twine themselves into an arch, that a pair of spoons would nestle their contours together, that two would become one. Silly, picture-book thinking, she realized. She could still love Michael even if she couldn’t read his mind or predict his responses; he could still love her even if he seemed complacent about her inner life. A spoon couldn’t nestle with a knife, that was all. It had been a mistake to imagine that marriage could alter mathematics. One plus one always made two.

  Men changed when they married you; that was what the village women promised. You wait, my girl, they had said. So Jean was only half surprised by the slow dulling of enjoyment and the arrival of tired discourtesies. What dismayed her more was how the very kindness and gentleness Michael had displayed while courting her now became a source of irritation to him. It seemed to make him cross that he was expected after marriage to behave as he had done before; and this crossness was itself a source of further crossness. Look, he seemed to say, you think that earlier I was deceiving you about what I was really like, don’t you. I wasn’t. I wasn’t cross then and I am cross now: how dare you accuse me of dishonesty? But it struck Jean as a matter of small importance whether or not he had been honest then, if he was cross now.

  Of course, it must be largely her fault. And it was, she supposed, normal that her inability to bear a child should set off inexplicable rages in Michael. They were inexplicable not because there wasn’t a cause—or at least a justification—but because her inability to conceive remained constant, yet his rages were always untimely.

  At first he had wanted to send her to a specialist. But she remembered the previous occasion when he had persuaded—no, tricked—her into going to London. One Dr. Headley was enough specialists for a lifetime. So she refused.

  “Perhaps I just need some Alpine air,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Alpine air restores the vitality of the subject.” She quoted it like a proverb.

  “Jean, darling.” He took her wrists and squeezed them as if he were about to say something affectionate. “Has anyone ever told you how abysmally stupid you are?”

  She looked away; he h
eld her wrists; she knew she would have to look at him—or at least reply—before he would let go of her. What was the point of his being nasty to her? She probably was stupid, though she half suspected she might not be; but even so, why should that make him cross? She hadn’t been any more intelligent when he met her, and he’d seemed not to mind it then. She felt a pain in her stomach.

  Finally, with a small measure of defiance, but not looking him in the face, she said, “You promised you wouldn’t send me back if I was defective.”

  “What?”

  “When I went to see Dr. Headley, I asked if you’d send me back if I was defective. You said no.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Well, if you do think I’m defective, you can send me back.”

  “Jean.” He held her wrists more tightly, but still she declined to look at that big red face on the boyish neck. “Christ. Look.” He sounded exasperated. “Look, I love you. Christ. Look, I love you. It’s just that I sometimes wish you were … different.”

  Different. Yes, she could see that was what he wanted. She was abysmally stupid and childless. He wanted her intelligent and pregnant. It was as simple as this. Heads we have six children, Tails we keep a cat. They would have to buy a cat.

  “I’ve got a pain,” she said.

  “I love you,” he replied, almost shouting with exasperation. For the first time, after five years of marriage, this information failed to move her. She didn’t disbelieve him, but the whole thing was way beyond a question of honesty now.

  “I’ve got a pain,” she repeated, feeling cowardly about her inability to face him. No doubt he despised her additionally for having a pain.